Coincidence? or, why I should pay attention to my car more often

I was out running errands on a misty Thursday morning in November when my tires slipped. Pulling away from the stop sign, moving uphill, the front tires of my Honda spun, veering the car to the left as if on ice.

Reacting with my winter-driving instinct, I eased off the accelerator, gripping the steering wheel firmly, but not twisting. An instant of imagining-myself-spinning-into-oncoming-traffic later, the tires caught the pavement, and my car and I continued safely forward.

Now, anything to do with my car freaks me out. Despite half of my mother’s family being able to recognize cars from the sound of the motor, I am not sure I could do the simplest tire change. I am the kind of girl who delays changing her engine oil until she can go to the cute guy car place in Michigan. (seriously—it got me into trouble last time!)

But I know enough to know that when your tires slip on pavement that has been wet for a good many hours, you should check your tires. So I did. And I didn’t know what I was looking at.

How do you know if a tire is bald? The tread was worn and looked kind of shabby—on all four tires. But then (and here is where I walk down the street, checking out other people’s tires), so did everyone else’s.

Perhaps I would not have been so concerned if I hadn’t been planning on traveling to Ohio on Friday. Three hours on the road with bad tires sounded like a bad idea.

So I did what I usually do with car questions—called my dad for his educated opinion. He, of course, could not see my tires, and told me that they should be fine until winter. But I should probably have them looked at before then. (He also thought I was over-reacting, which was also a plausible explanation.) In the meantime, I could continue with my plans to go to Ohio.

From Pittsburgh to Columbus, the drive is due west. In the afternoon, this means driving straight into the sun all afternoon long. That was my biggest challenge. The roads were dry. Tires never spun. Beautiful sunset in Ohio.

But Saturday morning brought cold rain with snow predictions on Sunday. “How do you know if tires are bald?” I asked my friends.

“With a penny,” they said. Apparently, if you stick a penny into the tire tread so that the top of Abe Lincoln’s head goes in first, you can tell if you have enough tread. From the top of his head to the edge of the penny is 2/32 of an inch, the legal requirement for tread. If you can see the top of Abe’s head, your tread is bad.

In my tires, Abe had the teeny cap with a ball on top—the tread being the ball.

“Your front tires are unsafe in any condition,” the tireman my friends recommended confirmed. “And the back tires are unsafe in snow. I’d recommend replacing all four.”

He said this at the same moment my brother called me with the information that the tires hadn’t been changed in five years—fifty thousand miles (a nice, long life for tires, I guess). It was time.

All four. Okay. My friend and I had planned on talking the day away anyway—might as well talk while we wait for tires. I knew that if I waited until I returned to Pittsburgh, I would procrastinate changing the tires. (Did I mention taking care of my car stresses me out?)

In the new tires, old Abe’s head was nowhere to be found. In the car, I felt slightly higher and confident.

On Sunday, my drive home was snowy, wet, and hilly. And I giggled the entire way—who knew that winter would come so quickly? My father was right: I did need to change the tires before winter. It appears that God alerted me to the situation just in time.